A Crescendo of Violence
MARSHALL, S. L. A.
A Crescendo of Violence RUSSIA AT WAR, 1941-1945 By Alexander Werth Dutton. 1.099 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by S. L. A. MARSHALL Brigadier General, U.S.A. (ret.); author, "Blitzkrieg." "Night...
...But he has few, if any, real heroes among men of the top layer...
...So regarding Bialystok...
...Wherever an avenue of inquiry opens, he heads for it, irrespective of risk...
...One must understand that Werth has dealt elsewhere at great length with major battles to possess perspective on this, his largest labor...
...Werth is not their competitor...
...The war in the USSR had a crescendo of violence, shock, brutality and atrocity beyond imagining by those of us who have only known great war on other fronts...
...The atmosphere reeked with it, so that it oppressed all daily life, terrorizing the innocent and brutalizing the taskmasters...
...But no writer whose primary goal is to inform exhaustively can write beautifully throughout...
...His profiling of them is convincing true-to-life stuff...
...Although he never agonizes, or lets his own feelings obtrude on copy, all of this comes through in Werth's narration until verily the senses become dulled...
...Even so, some of his best effects are achieved through a shrewd use of literary understatement...
...Night Drop" To attempt an appreciation of Alexander Werth's new book, without first speaking of what he signifies as a writer, is hardly sensible...
...He digs in and stays long...
...When his notes are complete, one may be sure that little of importance will be added to the subject by anyone else...
...All of this prefatory comment is by way of emphasizing that this current 1,099-page work was preceded by Moscow War Diary, Leningrad and The Year of Stalingrad, which were also lengthy...
...At least, he pegs the Americans quite accurately and so one must give him the benefit of the doubt when he portrays the Soviets...
...but the next worst thing...
...Richard Harding Davis and Ernie Pyle may be much better known to the English-speaking audience...
...The time must have come when he personally hardened, and went at his task like an automaton, transmitting what he saw and heard, but not burdening his emotions with it, else he could hardly have continued...
...So I join with Bill Shirer in his words on the dust jacket: "This, I think, is the best book we shall probably ever have in English on Russia at war...
...The book on Stalingrad ran 480 pages...
...What was said before cannot be repeated on and on in this overall exposition and analysis...
...He is a scholar interested in the entire panorama of war, its effect on forces under lire, its wasting of a countryside, its blighting of an economy, its impact on the masses, the emotions of the lowly, the pride of the mighty...
...It would be invidious to compare his work to that of others because he stands alone...
...It is not like going through the experience with him...
...He stays committed for the duration, as if he were under orders...
...Werth is the genuine article, not the flashy self-dramatizing counterfeit...
...But there is no voluminous description of the clash between battlefield forces...
...Werth knew all of the principals...
...Without exception, he is the most prodigious war correspondent of our time, and his gifts as an observer and recorder are not less than his output of energy...
...Many of the passages in his books have rare beauty...
...He has seen too much of the seamy side of character...
...Smolensk, the sieges of Kiev and Leningrad, the attack on Moscow and the defense of Stalingrad, along with the intermediate actions, there arc some flashbacks, anecdotes, the recounting of firsthand experiences, and enough outline to preserve continuity...
...That detracts little or nothing, however, from the high level of interest commanded by this writing...
...Names such as Floyd Gibbons...
...He observed and interviewed them under varying circumstances...
...If they have no other tribute, what he has written is worthy of the best and bravest...
...His tenderest thoughts are reserved for the little unknowns that he met in the ravaged villages, or in Leningrad when siege and starvation gripped it...
...unimportant people, memorable only because they accepted privation and dared death, uncomplaining, unafraid...
...Of the political side of the War —the fumbling and bumbling of Joe Stalin when first confronted with the threat, then the reality, of invasion, the maneuverings of Nikita Khrushchev at Kiev, the comings and goings of our diplomats, the contentions between the Old Bolsheviks and the rising young generals—there is acutely perceptive accounting...
...Front-page spreads are not of his seeking, and personal journalism is not his dish...
...His sweep is Tolstoy an...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
